Purpose, Audience, Genre

• Demographics. These measure important data about a group of people, such as their age range, their ethnicity, their religious beliefs, or their gender. Certain topics and assignments will require these kinds of considerations about your audience. For other topics and assignments, these measurements may not influence your writing in the end. Regardless, it is important to consider demographics when you begin to think about your purpose for writing.

• Education. Education considers the audience’s level of schooling. If audience members have earned a doctorate degree, for example, you may need to elevate your style and use more formal language. Or, if audience members are still in college, you could write in a more relaxed style. An audience member’s major or emphasis may also dictate your writing.

• Prior knowledge. This refers to what the audience already knows about your topic. If your readers have studied certain topics, they may already know some terms and concepts related to the topic. You may decide whether to define terms and explain concepts based on your audience’s prior knowledge. Although you cannot peer inside the brains of your readers to discover their knowledge, you can make reasonable assumptions. For instance, a nursing major would presumably know more about health-related topics than a business major would.

• Expectations. These indicate what readers will look for while reading your assignment. Readers may expect consistencies in the assignment’s appearance, such as correct grammar and traditional formatting like double-spaced lines and legible font. Readers may also have content-based expectations given the assignment’s purpose and organization. In an essay titled “The Economics of Enlightenment: The Effects of Rising Tuition,” for example, audience members may expect to read about the economic repercussions of college tuition costs.

TASK: Identify the following for your intended audience for your coursework:

• Demographics ____________________________________________

• Education ____________________________________________

• Prior knowledge ____________________________________________

• Expectations ____________________________________________

How have you specifically targeted your audience?

The purpose of a text means analysing what the text is for and what it is trying to achieve. Below is a list of the different types of purpose that a text can have:

• To advise

• To analyse

• To argue

• To inform

• To entertain

• To explain

• To instruct

• To persuade

• To review

• To describe

Some categories of texts have specific purposes. For example, any form of advertisement always has a purpose to persuade as the text will be wanting the reader to buy something. The purpose of a text can greatly affect how it is structured, its content, the language used and the literary devices that are used, which is why it is an essential aspect of writing to learn.

A text may just have one purpose but you need to be aware that it might have more than one. There are many different purposes that a text can have; for example, if someone is writing a letter to apply for a job then it will have a purpose to inform the employer of their qualifications and experience, to explain why they are the right fit for the role and to persuade the employer to give them the job.

When you are writing your own texts, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• What are you wanting to achieve from someone reading your text?

• Will a specific layout or structure need to be adapted in order for you to achieve this effectively?

• What language style will you need to adopt in order for the text to suit the requirements of its purpose, target audience and chosen genre?